U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden speaks during a meeting with representatives from the video game industry January 11, 2013 at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building of the White House in Washington, DC.

Vice President Joe Biden joined Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius on Friday afternoon to meet with video game industry leaders to discuss media violence and ways to curb gun violence in America.

Despite protests and criticism from some, the White House managed to pull in key figures from across the game industry. Executives from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) joined prominent electronics boutique retailer GameStop and game developers and publishers including Activision BlizzardElectronic ArtsTake-Two Interactive, Epic Games, and ZeniMax Media, according to a White House pool report.

The game industry executives were joined by researchers from Texas A&M International and UW at Madison, along with a representative from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.

Christopher Ferguson, a professor of psychology who has researched and written extensively about the impact of violent video games on their players and attended the meeting “as a researcher” for Texas A&M, told Speakeasy in a phone interview after the meeting that he was “cautiously optimistic” about its outcomes.

“Part of it was sort of a fact-finding thing for the VP,” Ferguson said, adding that he felt Biden had done his best to avoid turning the meetings with game industry leaders into “a witch hunt.”

Some members of the game industry felt that any meeting with the Vice President’s task force could be read as a tacit admission of guilt on their part for provoking real-world violence. But Biden’s meeting actually may indicate a sea-change in public opinion away from the kind of harsh criticisms that politicians like Joe Lieberman leveled at the game industry in the wake of 1999’s massacre at Columbine High School.

“It’s definitely different from that,” Ferguson said when asked how Biden’s current meetings with the game industry compared to the charges leveled against the medium in the aftermath of previous school shootings.

“I couldn’t say that the vice president had his arms around the industry and was saying how wonderful it was on the one hand,” Ferguson added. “But on the other hand, I didn’t detect that instantaneous rush to judgment and say the most negative thing either. I think he’s in a sort of neutral or agnostic position, which is probably quite reasonable with where they’re at right now.”

The meeting comes at the end of a long week for Biden’s special task force formed in response to the Sandy Hook shooting, a week that included meetings with everyone from the National Rifle Association to the Motion Picture Association of America all as part of an “effort to develop policy proposals in response to the tragedy in Newtown,” according to the official White House description.

“We know that there is no silver bullet,” Vice President Biden said at the beginning of his remarks on Friday afternoon, according to a pool report.

“I come to this meeting with no judgment. You all know the judgment other people have made,” Biden added.

He did not go into further detail about what, exactly, that “judgment” was. Biden did hold a meeting with the N.R.A. on Thursday, the organization that charged video games with taking part in a “a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people” in its first press conference after the shooting late last month.

When asked if he thought there was a “coarsening of our culture” at work in violent entertainment, Biden said, “I do not know the answer to that question.”

Prior to the meeting on Friday afternoon, a number of video game-related organizations had already written open letters to Biden and the White House task force offering their assistance in researching the topic, including the International Game Developers Association, the Entertainment Merchants Association and the Entertainment Consumers Association. A bill introduced in Congress last year that called for renewed inquiry into the effects of violent video games and other media on children has been prepared to be reintroduced to legislators later this month.

Meanwhile, several noted game critics such as Gamasutra editor-in-chief Kris Graft and Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost have dissented against the entire notion that the game industry needs to respond to political pressure.

“Everybody knows what Biden is implying when inviting the game industry to ‘participate’ in these talks,” Graft wrote Wednesday on his website. “If you’re meeting with Joe Biden about gun control, you’re stating that you are part of the problem, and therefore, you are part of the problem.”

“The games industry lost as soon as a meeting was conceived about stopping gun violence,” Bogost wrote Friday morning on The Atlantic. “Once more, public opinion has been infected with the idea that video games have some predominant and necessary relationship to gun violence, rather than being a diverse and robust mass medium that is used for many different purposes, from leisure to exercise to business to education.”

Ferguson, for his part, said that he thought “not going to the meeting would have been a mistake” for the game industry, one that made game publishers and developers seem “less helpful” when approached by politicians on the subject of media violence.

Over the past ten years, Ferguson said, scientific data has become “increasingly” clear in “pointing away from video games” as the cause of real-world violent behavior. But many segments of society who are either unfamiliar with video games or disturbed by their violent content remain unconvinced, and Ferguson said that today’s conference showed him that the game industry doesn’t “necessarily need to change anything they’re doing,” but instead focus on “how they’re perceived by the public.”

“What the industry needs to do is take the Vice President’s advice and really think about: what are some positive things that the industry can do? Public education campaigns about the ERSB rating systems, trying to avoid some blatant missteps like having a gun manufacturer as part of their website, that kind of stuff,” Ferguson said, referring to a controversial campaign in which Electronic Arts embedded links to weapons manufacturers’ products in the promotional website for its military shooter “Medal of Honor: Warfighter.”

A representative from EA was not immediately available for comment. Activision declined to comment on today’s meeting with the Vice President and other game industry leaders.

Related: WSJ’s Colleen McCain discusses the challenges associated with building a consensus on gun safety on The News Hub.

[Correction: An earlier edition of this post misidentified a retailer as GameSpot when was was really meant was GameStop.]